Brief Introduction to Research on Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar Retrieval of Precipitation

Precipitation is a fundamental component of the global water cycle.It is a key hydrologic variable of the water cycle in meteorology.Accurate observation of precipitation for regional and global distributions has always been a challenging scientific goal.Spaceborne Microwave data may carry precipitation information suppressing the impact of Cirrus.With fivedecade development of spaceborne sensors, the approaches to retrieving precipitation are prosperously developed.A brief review of generations of passive and active precipitation microwave sensors is given.More recently, forward physical model and the inversion techniques named Volterra Integral Equation(VIE)approach and model-oriented statistical(MOS)methodology to quantitatively derive precipitation by spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar measurements are presented to enhance spatial resolution and improve the statics of precipitation fields and dynamics of rain rate.